This is an extract from Sheila Rowbotham, (2010) Dreamers of a New Day: Women who Invented the Twentieth Century, London, Verso, pp. 115-124. Reprinted with kind permission from Verso.

The push towards seeing motherhood as a social activity in which intervention was possible contributed to a growing self-consciousness about how to mother. Carrica Le Favre’s Mother’s Help and Child’s Friend (1890) combined advice about bathing babies and letting fresh air into rooms, with exhortations about the importance of ‘moral sunshine’ in making for ‘domestic happiness’. She stressed that women’s rights involved responsibilities, and aimed to reconcile women to motherhood by raising the ‘esteem’ in which it was held.

Calls on women to seek alternative ways of mothering proved particularly popular in the United States, where self-help health movements proliferated and ‘mind-cure’ flourished. Alice B. Stockham, a feminist interested in spirituality and free love, followed up her 1896 alternative sex manual Karezza with her 1911 Tokology, covering pregnancy, childbirth and infant care. Stockham mixed common sense with mind control. Pregnant women were advised to avoid ‘tight lacing’, to take thermal baths, to adopt ‘fruit diets’ and deep breathing, to have massages, walk upstairs, stride up hills, do gymnastics and, when the baby was born, to breastfeed.

The utopian promise of the ideal offspring lurked behind all these proposals for better mothering. In Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s ideal future, the children are all mysteriously ‘eager, happy, courteous’.

In the early twentieth century, the Swedish feminist Ellen Key’s exaltation of the fulfilling aspects of motherhood exerted an international influence. Key’s conception of expressive mothering combined social demands for childcare provision and state payments for mothers, with the individualistic assertion of a woman’s right to fulfil her potential as a person. Key argued that women’s difference from men should be the basis for the reform of motherhood, and that women’s subordination was founded on their economic dependence on individual men. Her mystical celebration of mothers, elaborated in The Century of the Child (1900) and Love and Marriage (1904), redefined how to mother, and delineated how mothering could be endowed with new values.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman adopted a contrasting perspective, though she too wanted to change how mothering was seen and what it entailed. Gilman believed that the individual home confined women, and that they could make much better use of their mothering skills by moving outwards into society. In Moving the Mountain (1911), Gilman outlined the conditions necessary for her new motherhood.
a. Free, healthy, independent, intelligent mothers.
b. Enough to live on – right conditions for child-raising.
c. Specialized care.
d. The new social consciousness, with its religion, its art, its science, its civics, its brilliant efficiency.

Gilman was searching for opposing social values to a competitive, male-dominated capitalism. She located these not in an ideal of existing mothering, but in the potential it contained. In her ironic utopian work Herland (1915), Gilman depicted an all-female community which had established a maternalist co-operative haven based on nurture. Three male visitors, accustomed to the struggle for existence and the confinement of mothering within the domestic sphere, were deeply puzzled:

We are used to seeing what we call ‘a mother’ completely wrapped up in her own pink bundle of fascinating babyhood, and taking but the faintest theoretic interest in anybody else’s bundle, to say nothing of the common needs of all the bundles. But these women were working all together at the grandest of tasks – they were Making People – and they made them well.

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Gilman argued for new conditions for mothers, while suggesting that mothering carried values which were relevant to men as well as women, and could be translated into a universal social alternative. Like Key, Gilman combined individual fulfilment with social reorganization and a vision of community. Her ideas were influential in Britain as well as in America. In the Daily Herald in 1912, Mabel Harding dismissed ‘early Victorian platitudes about a woman’s place being the home, and her only true vocation that of wife, mother and housekeeper’. She asserted, like Gilman, that the home was not ‘encompassed by four walls, no longer is a woman confined to her own narrow circle’. Instead a woman now had duties to the ‘bigger family of the city and the state’.

Motherhood, for and against, aroused strong passions. While some radical women believed that changing motherhood was a crucial element in improving women’s lives and position in society, others were wary of highlighting biological or cultural difference; they considered that concepts of a gendered citizenship for mothers undermined a universal right based on a common humanity. Moreover, amidst all the talk about socialization, it was unclear whether the aim was to enhance or minimize mothering as an aspect of women’s lives. For some women adventurers, it was simply a trap. In 1892, Lizzie Holmes’s sister, the American Populist and Secretary of the Kansas Freethinkers’ Association, Lillie D. White, advised women to ignore ‘wifely and maternal ties and burdens’ and to ‘unlearn…any duties of any kind to gods, men or communities’.

The American socialist feminist Harriot Stanton Blatch tried to cut through the polarities and the passion by arguing that the key question was how to balance work and mothering.

The problem was how to achieve the desired equilibrium. In practice, women’s personal solutions ranged from leaving children with relatives or servants to living communally and sharing childcare. But by World War One a few middle-class American feminists and reformers were raising the sexual division of labour, both in their own personal domestic arrangements, and as a social issue with policy implications. The consciously modern Crystal Eastman wanted fathers to be involved with looking after the children, though her proposition of ‘marriage under two roofs’, whereby the man and woman lived in separate places when children arrived, suggests that sharing childcare would have presented difficulties for the unconventional semi-detached couples.

By the 1920s, progressive child-rearing theories in Britain were also beginning to count fathers in. However, when it came to the crunch, old habits died hard. Leonora Eyles described this graphically in the mid- 1920s. When baby wakes and cries:

‘Feed him,’ says father, and turns over dragging most of the clothes with him. Mother, afraid of a row, and distressed at spoiling the breadwinner’s night, feeds him. And in an hour’s time he wakes again, and is sick. Usually by this time both mother and father are wet and uncomfortable. Mother sleeps with one eye open, so that father shan’t be disturbed. And next day she gets up at the call of the alarm clock, red-eyed, fuzzy-headed, nervy, tired to death to begin the new day.

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Some supporters of childcare provision implied that mothers were not up to the task. Children, it was thought, would benefit from seeing less of their biological mothers. Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s conviction that isolated individual mothers in the home were so backward and inefficient that they held back their children, led her to argue for collective forms of childcare outside the home. She believed that once small children were in contact with trained and enlightened carers, they would find alternative role models with a wider view of life and society.

In the same year, Ada Nield Chew put the case for nurseries in a less authoritarian style. She proposed ‘beautiful baby gardens, quite near to the homes of the parents’, so babies could get the best of both worlds, adding, ‘A baby loves and thrives on a sunny mother, and the company of other babies is as dear to its baby soul as is the company of other children as they grow older.’

Women adventurers were divided on how children should be cared for and educated. While one wing emphasized the need for rigid training by applying method and system in raising the perfect offspring, others favoured libertarian approaches which derived from anarchist practice and from progressive educational theory. Louise Michel, the anarchist survivor of the Paris Commune, had established a free school in London when she was released from imprisonment; a teacher there, Agnes Henry, equated kindergarten educational theory with anarchism.

Margaret McMillan’s centre for children in South London constituted a hybrid, combining Louise Michel’s anarchist ideas of spontaneous development with the educationalist Édouard Seguin’s enthusiasm for garden schools, plus a dash of regulatory social hygiene.

In the early years of the twentieth century, progressive theories about child development were part of a wider challenge to educational methods mounted by the American John Dewey. Influenced by Hull House, Dewey linked education to a wider social awareness and stressed learning through ‘doing’. Charlotte Perkins Gilman gave this approach a gendered slant. In The Home (1903), she pointed out that children learn not only through formal teaching but through example. In order to break the pattern by which girls perpetuated the isolation and restricted outlook of the mother, they needed to experience a different upbringing.

Anarchists were especially critical of the authoritarianism in existing schooling. In 1892 Lizzie Holmes described schools as fostering ‘blind obedience’. She wanted an alternative which would encourage ‘the development of the human faculties, the rounding out of individual character… [and] the opening of the way to fresh and fullest activities’.

Both anarchists and socialists stressed the need to create a new culture. Annie Davison remembered her non-sectarian father sending her to the Partick Socialist Sunday-school in Glasgow, as well as to the anarchist one where she learned about fellowship, internationalism, the rights of labour, love, truth and justice.

‘Modern’ feminists of the 1920s were beginning to argue that new mothering required not simply the practical participation of men, but a new form of fathering. In The Right to Be Happy (1927), Dora Russell made the case for a democratic, shared parenting: ‘If we are to admit rights of parents at all, then those rights must be for father and mother, if both desire them.’

For Dora Russell, and for the American ‘moderns’ like Suzanne La Follette and Crystal Eastman, ‘the new motherhood’ required state resources and legislation along with economic independence and changes in working time. It also involved a new culture of sexual freedom and gender equality. They campaigned for practical reforms while trying to keep the way open for new definitions of mothering and fathering. However, their outlook was precariously situated, for the possibilities of transforming social relations were being assailed economically and politically. The most basic needs of women as mothers would be under threat in the depressed years of the 1930s.